For millions of people, Slack is a verb, a utility, and a way of life. It’s a safe bet: Last year, it was announced that Salesforce would acquire Slack for nearly $28 billion, in an ostensible bid to edge out Microsoft as the working world’s digital center of gravity. Arizona State University has more than 140,000 individual Slack accounts in its system the IT department considers it a tool that students should become acquainted with in school, like Excel or PowerPoint, because they will likely be using it for their entire professional lives. The Taylor Creek Church, in rural Washington State, uses it to coordinate prayer requests. Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg all paid for Slack during their 2020 presidential campaigns. So do Liberty Mutual, IBM, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and countless local businesses and nonprofits. Lyft, Airbnb, Venmo, Tumblr, and a raft of companies with names like Splunk and Deliveroo all use Slack-but so do Target, The New York Times, 1‑800‑Flowers, Harvard, AstraZeneca, and The Atlantic. Thanks in large part to the coronavirus pandemic, Slack has now seeped out of start-up land and into all corners of corporate America, with more than 169,000 organizations-including 65 of the Fortune 100-paying for its services. Instead, it was a whole new way for workers to talk to one another, and to demand answers from their bosses. What became clear was that Slack was never just another piece of software at Andela. But by late 2019, the issue was moot: The company-citing “market demands for more senior engineering talent”-had laid off 400 people and shut down its fellowship program. “This info has been flying around for a long time and it does not seem to bother Andela.” In a private employee-only Slack, they took to calling Andela “The Plantation.” Eventually, the fellows circulated a petition asking for higher pay-an effort organized over Slack. “I would like to know, did Andela at any point in time tell any news source we get 1/3?” wrote one. First, the #general Slack channel lit up with complaints, mostly from employees who had been talking among themselves about the issue for months. In the summer of 2019, a glowing BBC article misrepresented how much the fellows were paid, saying they made a third of what clients paid Andela, when in fact the amount varied and was sometimes lower. ![]() But when the fellows stopped being invited to those meetings, they created a private Slack channel where they’d air their grievances, especially about pay. The complaints started in private messaging groups, where they’d discuss priorities before big meetings, in order to act as a sort of bloc in front of senior leadership. ![]() Over time, it also became the site of a workplace revolt, as the company’s fellows-engineers in training-began to agree that they were being mistreated. As the company grew, Slack became its central nervous system, the place where business was conducted and where the company’s culture was formed. ![]() The maker of the chat software had recently become one of San Francisco’s trendiest new companies, based on a promise to make work communication more transparent and fluid. Andela’s model was to recruit and train promising African engineers, then place them at Western tech firms, which meant its employees and clients were scattered across time zones it desperately needed a way for its distributed workforce to share information and make decisions easily and asynchronously, ideally without subjecting anyone to a deluge of emails. In 2014, the executives at a brand-new start-up called Andela made a decision whose consequences they would only understand much later.
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